[ryandrake]

At what point does a software become mission critical? Would we be so accepting of this easter egg if it was in 'cat' or 'grep' rather than 'man'? I mean, yes, it's open source, so all downstream users can patch it out, but shouldn't unexpected output be considered a bug by the main upstream maintainer? How about an official branch, man-with-easter-eggs for users who want to debug this kind of fun at 00:30 in the morning.

[GrinningFool]

Conversely why does your determination that an open source project is 'mission critical' to your use case obligate the author to make any changes at all for you?

[ryandrake]

I don't think the maintainer should be obligated to do anything. It would be courteous to treat it as a bug and maybe even provide a patch so that downstream users can easily fix it, but not an obligation. It looks like this one is already fixed so the point is moot.

If the primary maintainer of 'cat' decided it would be funny to have it output "meow" when run at 00:30 in the morning, it's totally their right to do it. I'd expect a lot of downstream users wouldn't find it that funny and would want to patch it out pretty quickly.

[Delk]

I don't think 'man' is that commonly used in scripts or as part of other automated processes that could go wrong. Most other unix utilities are fairly commonly used that way and a small behavioural change could be expected to break something somewhere just due to the sheer volume of use.

I'm not actually that surprised the easter egg broke something for someone even in 'man', for the exact same reason, but it's probably less expected than with grep and lots of other unix utilities.